CDW’s New Cloud Collaboration and Unified Communications Offering

CDW is now offering a CDW Cloud Collaboration solution for businesses, which in a nutshell bundles Cisco system's collaboration tools with CDW's managed services. These offerings use "the cloud" as the vehicle for this unified communication system. Tools included in this system include such things as video conferencing, voice-mail, mobility features, instant messaging, and much more to help give businesses an extremely secure and reliable system to collaborate from anywhere at any time.

Basically, they are providing a top tier platform for your company's employees to maximize their productivity and ability to collaborate from anywhere and on any device, without tying up your IT staff, so they can work on other things than setting up and maintaining a system like this.

While this is a new offering from CDW, they are no featherweight when it comes to these sorts of IT services for businesses. For instance, in the last decade they've rolled out more than 4,000 Cisco Unified Communication deployments. CDW has a large staff of trained professionals manning their massive data center (which incidentally is about 485,000 square feet and uses about 8.2 megawatts of electricity). Among them are 50 Cisco Certified Internetwork Experts to help you in the process of migrating to a cloud-based collaboration system. Their data center for their various services also is a Tier 4 hosting environment offering "four nines of up time", which you can see more about in the below video. You can also check out CDW’s Solutions blog

Bonus Facts:

The character of Data on Star Trek was quoted as having a memory capacity of 800 quadrillion bits or about 100 petabytes. For reference, this is about 1/716 the amount of data downloaded on the internet every day. That might not sound like much in terms of his capacity, but it is currently estimated that all the digital data in the world today only adds up to around 8000 times Data’s storage capacity. Further, as recently as 2005, all the text data on the internet was thought to only add up to around 1/50th of Data’s capacity.

If you have a computer hard drive that failed, you should try putting it in the freezer inside a plastic bag for about 20 minutes. After that, immediately put it back into your computer. This may sound ridiculous, but sometimes that will cause it to work long enough for you to copy your data to another drive. Repeat as necessary until you’ve got all your data off. (Many people often don't believe me when I first tell them this, until they actually try it and see it sometimes works. If it helps, I have a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science, which means everyone I've ever met is constantly trying to get me to fix their computers. As such, I have "fixed" numerous hard drives this way over the years, at least long enough to be able to get the needed data off.)

The term “virus”, as referring to self replicating computer programs, was coined by Frederick Cohen who was a student at California’s School of Engineering. He wrote such a program for a class. This “virus” was a parasitic application that would seize control of the computer and replicate itself on the machine. He then specifically described his “computer virus” as: “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself.” Cohen went on to be one of the first people to outline proper virus defense techniques. He also demonstrated in 1987 that no algorithm could ever detect all possible viruses.

Though it wasn’t called such at the time, one of the first ever computer viruses was called “Creeper” and was written by Bob Thomas in 1971. He wrote this virus to demonstrate the potential of such “mobile” computer programs. The virus itself wasn’t destructive and simply printed the message “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Creeper spread about on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. It worked by finding open connections and transferring itself to other machines. It would also attempt to remove itself from the machine that it was just on, if it could, to further be non-intrusive. The Creeper was ultimately "caught" by a program called "the reaper" which was designed to find and remove any instances of the creeper out there.

While terms like “Computer Worm” and “Computer Virus” are fairly commonly known, one less commonly heard term is "Computer Wabbit". This is a program that is self replicating, like a computer virus, but does not infect any host programs or files. The wabbits simply multiply themselves continually until eventually causing the system to crash from lack of resources. The term "wabbit" itself references how rabbits breed incredibly quickly and can take over an area until the environment can no longer sustain them. Pronouncing it “wabbit” is thought to be in homage to Elmer Fudd’s pronunciation of "rabbit".